Rokt research shows what online shoppers expect in 2026, and why most brands are still playing catch-up

Free shipping stopped being a selling point somewhere around 2023. Today, according to a 2025 Digital Commerce 360/Bizrate Insights survey, 74% of online shoppers rank it as their top priority when deciding where to purchase, ahead of delivery speed, brand loyalty, and every other factor surveyed. For e-commerce brands still treating complimentary shipping as a differentiator, that number is a late wake-up call.

The shift is one piece of a much larger picture. Rokt's 2026 analysis of changing customer expectations maps out six dimensions where consumer standards have moved from preference to requirement: personalisation, frictionless checkout, transparent delivery, meaningful post-purchase experiences, sustainability signaling, and AI-assisted discovery. Together, they describe a shopper who has been thoroughly trained by the best digital experiences available and now holds every retailer to those same standards, regardless of size or category.

Free Shipping Is a Floor, Not a Feature

The economics of free shipping have been absorbed by shoppers so thoroughly that many no longer register it as a brand decision. It's infrastructure. When 74% of buyers name it their single most important factor, the question for brands shifts from "should we offer it" to "how do we sustain the margin." 

The returns policy has followed the same trajectory. Narvar's 2024 research found that 84% of shoppers who have a bad returns experience will not buy from that retailer again. That figure puts the post-purchase process squarely in the category of brand-defining moments, not operational afterthoughts.

Rokt has written extensively about why the confirmation page and post-purchase window deserve the same strategic attention retailers give to acquisition, and the consumer data increasingly backs that framing. As Rokt notes in its breakdown of post-purchase experience, the most effective strategies involve highly targeted, relevant offers at the moment a customer finalises their purchase.

Personalisation Has Become Table Stakes

According to Salesforce's State of the Connected Customer report, 80% of customers now expect personalised experiences, and 74% describe frustration when a website fails to deliver them. McKinsey's research suggests personalisation can drive revenue lifts of 10-15%, and that shoppers who receive product recommendations tied to their actual purchase history are 60% more likely to return.

Those numbers frame personalisation less as a marketing advantage and more as a baseline requirement. Rokt's research with The Harris Poll reinforces the point from a different angle: in the U.S., 70% of shoppers are willing to spend more with businesses that genuinely understand their preferences. The same study found that 29% of shoppers cited being bombarded with irrelevant ads as a reason for abandoning their carts.

The practical tension here is real. More personalisation requires more data, and more data collection increasingly runs into consumer privacy expectations and regulatory constraints. The brands navigating this well are building on first-party data, the signals that come from actual purchase behaviour, rather than relying on third-party targeting infrastructure that is steadily being phased out. Rokt's AI-powered platform is built around this approach, using real purchase behaviour and transaction-moment context to deliver relevance without relying on third-party cookies.

Checkout Friction Is a Revenue Problem

Fixing checkout usability problems could increase e-commerce conversion rates by up to 35%, according to research cited in Rokt's 2026 customer expectations analysis. The most common friction points are forced account creation, unsupported payment methods, and slow pages. None of them is technically difficult to address, which makes their persistence in many checkout flows genuinely puzzling.

Digital wallet adoption offers some context on how quickly shopper behaviour can shift once a frictionless option appears. Worldpay's 2024 Global Payments Report found that 53% of global online transactions that year were completed via digital wallets. Merchants who haven't prioritised wallet support are losing a majority of the transactions happening around them.

Rokt Chief Commercial Officer Elizabeth Buchanan framed the checkout moment directly in the company's 2026 commerce media outlook: "Checkout is where intent is confirmed, not assumed. It's the single most valuable signal in digital commerce." That view, detailed in Rokt's annual commerce media outlook released via PR Newswire, has driven the company's product development across its Transaction Moment suite, the window from product selection through purchase confirmation.

AI Has Restructured How Shoppers Arrive at Checkout

A March 2026 McKinsey update found that 62% of U.S. consumers now use AI-powered tools, specifically ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, to compare brands, research product categories, and find purchase inspiration. Social commerce has compressed the funnel from a different angle: TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping, and Pinterest's shoppable pins have reduced the time between discovery and purchase from days to seconds.

The combined effect is a shopper who arrives at checkout with sharper intent and a shorter consideration set. Salesforce's 2025 holiday data showed AI-referred traffic converting nine times more often than social referrals, a ratio that gives some sense of how much decision-making is now happening upstream, before a customer even reaches a brand's website.

Rokt's analysis of these trends, published in February 2026, drew a specific implication from this shift: when AI handles discovery, brand differentiation has to happen at execution. The checkout window becomes the first moment a brand fully controls, and the last moment to confirm or undermine the customer's decision.

The Silicon Review's coverage of Rokt's 2026 strategy noted that the company’s bespoke AI analyses more than 1.95 trillion data points per year to determine the next best action in real time at the point of purchase, a scale that gives its AI models an unusual depth of behavioral signal to work from.

Sustainability Expectations Have Aged Into the Mainstream

Deloitte's 2024 Global Consumer Tracker found that 40% of consumers actively choose brands with strong environmental credentials, up from 22% in 2021. Among shoppers aged 18 to 44, that share rises to 45%. Eco-friendly packaging, carbon-offset delivery options, and transparent supply chain communication have moved from premium differentiators into expected features at mid-market positioning. 

Brands that have treated sustainability as marketing copy rather than operational commitment are increasingly running into a credibility gap. Younger cohorts in particular appear to apply scrutiny proportional to the claims being made.

Search Abandonment Costs U.S. Retailers $234 Billion a Year

That figure comes from Bennett Carroccio, SVP at Rokt Catalog, writing for Retail Customer Experience. It reflects how thoroughly shopper tolerance for dead ends has eroded. Shoppers now expect a retailer to surface relevant alternatives when a product is out of stock, show meaningful options across an expanded assortment, and make the path to purchase feel personal rather than generic. 

Carroccio's piece argues that marketplace infrastructure, meaning curated third-party assortments rather than open sprawl, is becoming a structural necessity rather than a growth experiment. The retailers making progress here are the ones using AI to match customers with relevant options in real-time, rather than relying on static catalog structures that can't respond to live intent signals.

Rokt Catalog, for instance, brings over 1.2 million third-party products from 4,600-plus premium brands directly into the transaction moment, giving retailers the ability to meet demand they can't serve from their own inventory without the operational overhead of managing it.

The Post-Purchase Gap

One of the more counterintuitive findings in Rokt's 2026 customer expectations breakdown concerns loyalty. Brands traditionally deliver loyalty rewards days after a purchase: points posting, cashback clearing, confirmation emails with future discount codes. The timing mismatch is significant.

Rokt's 2026 commerce predictions, covered by PR Newswire in January, flagged this as an area ripe for redesign. Brands that bring relevant loyalty benefits directly into checkout, at the moment a customer is actively transacting, create a real-time loop of engagement that post-purchase timing simply can't replicate. 

A qualitative study by an internal UX team at a top-10 U.S. retailer, detailed on Rokt's blog, confirmed the consumer psychology behind this. Shoppers draw a clear line between offers that feel connected to their shopping behaviour and those that feel random. When an offer reflects what they just bought or how they typically shop, it gets considered. When it feels disconnected, it gets filed as noise, and that impression attaches to the retailer, not just the offer.

What the Data Adds Up To

The six dimensions Rokt identifies aren't independent variables. They compound. A shopper who arrives through an AI-assisted discovery channel carries a narrower intent, expects immediate relevance, has less friction tolerance, and will apply sustainability and personalization criteria before and after the purchase. Getting one dimension right and failing on another is enough to break the relationship. 

Rokt's network, which is on track to power more than 10 billion transactions in 2026 across 33,000-plus partner companies, gives the company an unusual vantage point on how these expectations play out at scale. More than half of the world's leading e-commerce brands are in that network, which means the behavioral patterns Rokt tracks are drawn from a sample broad enough to reflect genuine market-wide shifts rather than category-specific anomalies.

The underlying dynamic is straightforward: consumers have been educated by the best experiences available, not the best in retail, but the best anywhere. When two-day delivery, seamless checkout, and genuinely relevant recommendations become expectations formed by whoever delivers them best, every other player in the market gets measured against that bar. Brands that keep treating any of the six dimensions Rokt outlines as optional will continue finding that customer retention numbers tell a story their acquisition spend can't explain away.